The land of the Central Plains originally refers to Guanzhong.
So, what I want to explain here is the Central Plains after the unification of Qin.
The word "zhong" now refers to "center" and "center", and any center must have a corresponding angle. For a container, even if it is flat-bottomed, it must have the maximum capacity in the center, because it can rise in the center. Therefore, modern population distribution is of great guiding significance for understanding the population carrying capacity of various places. Although it is distorted to a certain extent due to the developed coastal areas at present, it is basically punctate for China, so the interference is not great (except for Jiangsu coastal areas to a certain extent):
As can be seen from the above picture, the Central Plains with population significance is not actually Henan, but an area with Bozhou as the center and Taihang Mountain, Mount Taishan (Mengshan) and Dabie Mountain as the approximate boundaries (blue circle in the above picture).
Although we have experienced the eastward and southward movement of the political and economic center. But the big geographical environment has basically not changed. The Huanghuai Plain, which roughly corresponds to the above population centers, is still the main body of the North China Plain under the situation that the coastal areas of Hebei and Jiangsu have expanded eastward:
The boundary in the above picture is not clear, only the approximate position is marked. Details are as follows:
At the red line in the above picture, starting from Dabie Mountain, the landmark boundaries in the roughly counterclockwise direction are Zhangbaling, Hongze Lake, Mengshan, the southern foot of Taihang Mountain, the eastern foot of Funiu Mountain and Tongbai Mountain. This area is almost a Ma Pingchuan. Handan (Anyang) and Huai 'an, which are completely open in the north and east, are important towns, while Dabie Mountain and Funiu Mountain are due south and west respectively, so the situation of going out in these two directions is divided into two directions: Luoyang is located in Hulao Pass in the northwest, the border of southwest and west is broken, Nanyang is the important town, Yiyang is the important town of east-southwest three passes, and Hefei is the important town.
Due to the above-mentioned relationship between mountains and rivers and the influence of internal hydrology, most of the upper and lower reaches of the Yellow River and Huaihe River can be merged first, and finally the confrontation in the Central Plains is mostly northwest-southeast confrontation (that is, the white line formed by the connection of Xiangyang and Bozhou in the picture is the confrontation between north and south in China).
Because there is no danger in the Central Plains, the way to control the Central Plains becomes to control the periphery of a corner (between the red line and the black line in the above picture). Taking the typical Guanzhong model as an example, the so-called "Three Rivers and One Pass", namely Guanzhong and Hedong, is the core force of Guanzhong, which correspondingly controls Luoyang (including Nanyang to some extent, to guard against Jingzhou rebellion) and Anyang (actually a prominent part of Changzhi Basin, to guard against Hebei rebellion):
The main body of Henan now is Luoyang (including Nanyang), Hanoi where Anyang is located, and the western part of the Central Plains (red circle). This is actually the administrative central plains of Guanzhong standard.
According to the southeast (Nanjing) standard, the most commonly used strategic theory of the southeast regime is "defending the river and defending the Huaihe River". The significance of Huaihe River defense system is equivalent to Henan defense (control) system (with Luoyang as the center and Nanyang and Hanoi):
This defense system may be called "three ports and one Huai (An)". The three ports are Hangzhou (Ningbo Port), Ancient Haizhou (Lianyungang) and Nanjing (Hong Kong). If the southeast forces in history pay more attention to navigation technology, they can send troops from the sea to compete with Guanzhong for Hebei (first digest the Korean Peninsula, and even imprison Japan), and then unify China, then the administrative central plains in this context are generally northern Jiangsu and Anhui (north of the Yangtze River, including Nanjing).
To sum up, the narrow sense of the Central Plains, which really has geographical significance, has not changed in the era of cold weapons (before the great voyage). But because of the rule, the administrative central plains (Henan) came into being; And because of the foreign war (and the civil war), the broad sense of the Central Plains was born:
This concept is basically based on the geographical (population) Central Plains, plus Hebei, Guanzhong and Jinyang (pictured above), the connecting areas of these two corners.
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